Once sales took off, they gathered hugemomentum. But looking back over the trajec-tory of Dyson’s story begs the question: Whyhad it taken quite so long for Dyson to go fromidea to accolades? Why did he inch his waytoward success through 5,127 time-consum-ing, fully functional prototypes? The shortanswer is that the long, hard slog is exactlyhow Dyson thinks it should be. “Our societyhas an instant-gratification thing,” he says.“We admire instant, effortless brilliance. Ithink quite the reverse. You should admire theperson who slogs through and gets there inthe end.”Dyson was joined at times by variousassistants and partners, and ceaselessly sup-ported by his wife, but there were long peri-ods of physical and professional isolation. TheConnection wondered if the self-confessed“misfit” is also something of ahappy loner and if this was anecessary ingredient in hiseventual success. “I’m OKalone. I’m quite happyalone,” he says. “If you’vegot a burning ambition, anidea, you’ve got to work itout on your own; I wasquite prepared to do that. Itwas quite formative, I think,making all the decisionsmyself and working out whatexperiments to do next. It wasgood experience.”For a man who takes suchdelight in the process of invent-ing, how much of a wrench wasit to go from utter absorption ina single beloved product tohanding over control for dozens of new prod-uct pipelines as he does now? He responds,“When you’re doing it all yourself, you havecomplete control, but with 1,300 engineers,there’s a lot going on that you don’t see.

Celebrating mistakes

IMAGES COURTESY DYSON LTD

Dyson credits one of his lifelong heroes,Thomas Edison, with inspiring his painstak-ingly iterative approach. It is an ethos he triesto infuse his organization with today. “I don’tcare how long things take,” he tells TheConnection. “Failure is to be celebrated—that’s how we learn. At Dyson we’re a univer-sity. We invest in and rejoice in failure, andwe stick at it. I learned from each of my mis-takes. That’s how I came up with a solution.So I don’t mind failure.”You might expect a perfectionist streak inan inventor whose approach is so meticulous.You’d be wrong. Dyson is actually surprisinglypragmatic: He notes, “ ‘Perfect’ is in fact com-pletely the wrong word to use. You start witha goal and you make the best possible versionyou can make at that moment. You give thecustomer the best available at that moment,and then you set another goal and start work-ing on it again.”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 28

supplier profile

Sprinkling of Dyson dust

Perhaps this passion for depth and detail
is also behind the Dyson product strategy:

Company:Dyson Ltd. Founder:Sir James Dyson Employees:
3, 100 Headquarters:Tetbury Hill, Malmesbury, Wiltshire Contact:1-866-693-9766;
www.dyson.com;
questions@dyson.com Products at Costco:DC33 (#765200); DC40 (#630640—exclusive to Costco). Fans arriving in summer 2012. Selection varies by location. Comment about Costco:“We’ve worked
with Costco for eight exciting and successful
years. As well as selling our machines, we’re
delighted that Costco also uses them—our
Dyson Airblade hand dryer can be found in
many Costco warehouses.”—Sir James Dyson